Adobe's come up with an application that lets users look at past versions of Web pages or sections of pages and perform complex comparisons of various data, such as exchange rates or gas prices over time. A scroll bar at the bottom of the screen allows you to scroll backwards in time. So, for example, if you were on the WhatIs.com home page, you could scroll backwards to see what the Word of the Day was yesterday, check out the Overheard in the Blogosphere quote and the trivia and Writing for Business questions. You can also perform more complicated research and explore correlation among varying factors over time.

Site director Margaret Rouse and I were IMing a couple of weeks ago, which we do a fair amount of because our “office” spans about 800 miles. We were discussing a definition for Fennec, Mozilla’s mobile version of the Firefox browser when suddenly she said, apropos of nothing I could discern, “It’s so cute!”

As you probably know, IM conversations are prone to the occasional missed step or dropped thread. I wondered briefly what she was talking about. A cute browser, I wondered? But I had faith… and then there it was, a link. Here’s what I saw:

No denying, it’s cute. But I was still none the wiser. I knew that Margaret is a dog person and, in fact, has raised guide dogs. That’s a cute pup, I said. “What kind is it?” It’s a fennec, she told me. A little fox. (Comprehension was, you’ll be glad to hear, swift and, well, comprehensive: Big Firefox: full-sized fox mascot. Small verson: small fox mascot. Gotcha.)

At least at this point, the mobile adaptation of Firefox is named for a small, desert-dwelling fox. Here’s a video demo:[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/plykL77bL-c" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

William Gibson noted recently that the cyberpunk fiction he’d been writing over the past quarter century has now become science fact. Pattern Recognition and Spook Country are both set in near-futures with technology and social norms that are only a slight extension of the complex technological realities of the present. The neural shunt that jacks you into the network he imagined in Neuromancer hasn’t quite have arrived yet but some humans now have direct brain-computer interfaces implanted in their brains.

Brad Feld appreciates this relationship between science fiction and fact as few others do. As he writes in ‘Science Fact‘ on Oblong’s web blog, the future of human-computer interaction is looking breathtaking. And, while the genetically-engineering precognitive humans Philip K. Dick imagined in “Minority Report” in 1956 haven’t arrived yet, g-speak certainly has.

g-speak is a spatial operating environment from Oblong Industries that combines a gestural interface, DLP projectors and ‘recombinant networking.” It’s modeled upon the virtual OS operated by Precrime Agent John Anderton in Minority Report, the film adaptation of Dick’s short story.

That connection is no accident. The science adviser that Spielberg consulted for the film, John Underkoffler, has been quietly busy since the film’s premiere in 2002. A fewstorieshave popped up over the years, to be sure, but since Oblong Industries was founded in the research in 2006 he and other technologists have advanced the technology considerably, as you’ll see in the video below.

It’s called ‘buckypaper’ and looks a lot like ordinary carbon paper, but don’t be fooled by the cute name or flimsy appearance. It could revolutionize the way everything from airplanes to TVs are made.

Goood eeevvvening! (It’s always evening here in the Vault of Tech Terror.) Don’t be afraid, Younnnnng Onnnne — that creaking sound you heard was only the vault door swinging slooowly open. The scuffling noises? Oh, that’s just … the “pets” in the pit. And the pounding sound you hear is … your own heart as you face the most terrifying quizzes in all of Techdom! So, put on your garlic necklace, make sure you’ve got your holy water nearby… take a deep breath… and enter The Vault of Tech Terror.

“For a service that was forecast by Gartner last year to be part of a more than $2 billion market segment by 2011, SIP trunking remains one of those technical phrases used in vendor circles that is marched out with pride to prospective distributors and customers and received by the marketplace with bewilderment.”

I’m always extremely impressed when marketing people actually demystify terms, instead of spinning hype and building the “baffle ‘em with BS” model to new levels. In this article, Joel Maloff, VP of Marketing for BandTel, explains SIP trunking. Here’s an excerpt:

In a survey commissioned by my company earlier this year, we discovered that even so-called industry experts — analysts, reporters, and others — could not agree on a definition for SIP trunking, nor could they consistently identify the leaders in delivery of SIP trunking services. However, it is not hard to understand the confusion in the general marketplace. For example, a February 2008 Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) draft document entitled “What is aSession Initiation Protocol ( News – Alert) (SIP) Trunk Anyway?” provided the following definition:

A SIP trunk is a virtual sip entity on a server constrained by a predefined set of polices and rules that determine how to process requests. (J. Rosenberg, 2008, http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-rosenberg-sipping-siptrunk-00.txt)

No wonder there is confusion!

The same draft also describes SIP trunking in more mainstream circles as a service for enterprises that allows connection to the PSTN as a displacement for circuit-based connections, and as a replacement for costly leased lines connecting distributed telephone systems within an enterprise.

So let’s cut through the mystery and confusion. SIP trunking, simply put, is a way for organizations to accomplish something that they already do, but for less money, with equal or better quality, and with greater functionality. It is also a way for enterprises that were too small and could not afford leased line services to achieve comparable benefits as the big boys but for much more attractive fees than previously. All of this is now achievable because of the underlying packet-switched technology of the Internet as opposed to circuit-switched architecture from the past. SIP is simply the framework that vendors and service providers have agreed to use to accomplish the completion of telephone calls and much more.

Another challenge is that SIP trunking providers differ from one another, and can roughly be grouped in the following three categories: SIP trunks via dedicated lines, SIP trunks in conjunction with hosted services, and pure SIP trunking providers.